Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Into the Fold is part of the Texas Podcast Network, the Conversations Changing the World, brought to you by the University of Texas at Austin. The opinions expressed in this podcast represent the views of the hosts and guests and not of the University of Texas at Austin. Hi, welcome to into the Fold, the mental health podcast. I'm your host, Ike Evans, and today we're delighted to bring you episode six seventy seven, Rhythms of Resilience.
[00:00:28] Speaker B: When you get up on stage, that's where I think the beauty of the improvisation.
You know, when you are a natural, gifted, schooled musician, the improvisation then comes in and takes over and it's the most magnificent feeling. It's like going into a kitchen and you have, let's say you've gone to culinary, you know, institute and you've learned and you go into your home kitchen and you know what it takes to make this grand dinner. But at some point you got to put in your own, your own improvisation in the meal. And that's why what you do from what everyone else does is, you know, it has to be different, foreign.
[00:01:23] Speaker A: This is Ike Evans and welcome to the podcast. For this episode, we're trying to do a couple things.
First, we're giving you a sneak preview of the Hogg Foundation's Robert Lee Sutherland Seminar, the Foundation's signature event since 1978.
Second, we want you to hear and feel the event's theme, Growing Together, Building capacity for collective wellness through the power of percussion. We're calling this episode Rhythms of Resilience. And that's just what we mean.
Through every convening, through every attempt at meaningful connection, we tap out a rhythm of resilience, adding yet one more implement to people's toolbox of collective wellness.
And so it is appropriate that our two guests for today are Nina Rodriguez, a Grammy Award winning percussionist from San Antonio who will be delivering the keynote address at the Robert Lee Sutherland Seminar.
And providing some loving counterpoint is our own Dr. Kelly Glover, postdoctoral research fellow for the Hogg foundation and a music educator herself.
Among other questions, we are asking, why music?
Why music now? Why music at rls?
Nina and Kelly, welcome to both of you.
[00:02:43] Speaker B: Thank you. Happy to be here.
[00:02:45] Speaker C: Thanks for having us.
[00:02:47] Speaker A: So, just getting to our first topic, why music?
So one thing that I'm just curious about is music is very easy to idealize, but there is a lot that goes into being a working musician, to say nothing of teaching others or using it as a teaching tool.
Not just your own training and practice, but also the prep work that kind of goes into facilitating anything.
And so I was wondering if you could kind of each give a sense of.
Kind of your own practice and some of the more significant, you know, challenges that you have to work through.
Kelly, if you'd like to take the.
[00:03:36] Speaker C: First swing at that, I will start off by saying, as a singer, songwriter, musician, music educator, my challenges mostly stemmed from me being a woman.
I found that in music, academia and as a performer, singers aren't taken as seriously.
When you're working with a lot of male musicians and you have big ears like I do, when it comes to harmony, they don't quite trust that you know what you're talking about, and they'll. And they'll try to tell you what you should do or shouldn't do. And so that.
That fueled me to really get into vocal arranging and harmony, which is what I love to do. And as a music educator, I found that finding culturally relevant music to teach my kids was sometimes lacking. So that caused me to write a lot of my own music and write my own curriculum, and it ended up in my creating music education products with the Music Education Technology Company to create culturally relevant music for all children, but especially for children from marginalized backgrounds who don't hear their music played back to them in the music education space, especially when you get into the higher grades, it's expected that you do European classical music. And I like to expose children to the whole world of music.
[00:05:17] Speaker A: Okay, Nina, I'd love to get your thoughts.
[00:05:21] Speaker B: So I love to look at challenges as opportunities. Right. So I approach events based upon, you know, the end result. What is the goal? What would we like to accomplish? Who is my audience? What are the challenges that they face?
And how can we connect the dots? How can we bring everyone to a place of trust, a place of connection, and a place of collaboration where we're all communicating together. And for me, rhythm has always been the tool of engagement.
Since I've been a child, music gave me a voice, and I've. I've seen how, you know, rhythm is such a powerful ingredient.
When we want to create a space where we feel seen, we feel heard, and we truly feel valued. And the beauty about bringing percussion and drums into a space is the fact that we don't really need a lesson in music. All we need is a willing heart, and.
And with that, we can begin to connect our heartbeats and create this unified beat together. And from there, the conversation grows musically and rhythmically.
[00:06:48] Speaker A: Getting only as personal as you're comfortable with, just a sense of how a life in music helps you with your own mental health. And well, being.
[00:07:00] Speaker B: Well, you know, music is a form of art, right? And everyone has rhythm. I mean, we're born with rhythm.
The first beat that we're exposed to is the rhythm of our mother's heartbeat.
So rhythm is in all of us, and it has to be expressed in one art, art form or another. And so for me, the mental health challenges have always been to. To trust the music in me and to trust the creativity.
Life is beautiful. Life is what we make of it every day when we, you know, get out of bed and we face a new day. And, you know, how we face that day has a lot to do with, you know, our mental attitude. You know, the world is very noisy right now, but the escape for me is always getting back into my music room.
[00:07:58] Speaker C: Yeah. So when I was a little girl, so I'm the youngest, being the youngest of four, I was the invisible child.
And I stuttered as a child, I either stuttered or it took me a very, very, very long time to get the words out because my brain was going 15 billion miles per hour. And so whenever anyone paid attention to me, I would get so overwhelmed that I couldn't talk.
So my mother put me into musical theater because I used to love lip syncing and dressing up and things like that.
And I come from a family of singers, and so putting me into musical theater helped me to find my voice. It helped me to not stutter anymore, and it helped me to.
It helped me to be seen as an adult when I lost my ability to sing. For about the past 15 years, I haven't been able to sing regularly, professionally because of having tons of vocal problems. And so losing my identity as a singer was huge because that's all I ever did. I was a singer and a music educator, a choral music educator. So learning how to express myself through words and learning how to express myself even more and with others, vibrating with others through drumming, through doing drumming circles became my new way of expressing myself and helping other people to express themselves.
Even when I couldn't sing, it helped me to connect with people in another way that was just as satisfying because vibration is everything. I've got to vibrate with people and connect with people, and that's what music does for me. It's very healing.
[00:09:59] Speaker B: Everything she resonates with me, she's so spot on, you know, and it's such a beautiful thing because people, when they come in to a drumming experience or a rhythmic experience, they're connecting to their inner rhythm and they're creating this beautiful space where they recognize that Their voice matters themselves without any rules, without any thought, without any judgment, and they really become one with that instrument.
[00:10:42] Speaker A: So just so our listeners have a sense, on a couple of occasions, Kelly has brought her music into our spaces here at the Hawk foundation for different exercises that have involved, I dare say, practically the entire staff across the two instances that I'm thinking of. And yeah, if you could just kind of give your own sense of what that was like for you, considering the fact that you're still fairly new to us.
[00:11:17] Speaker C: Yeah, so it is.
[00:11:21] Speaker A: Kind of along the way of getting to know you.
[00:11:23] Speaker C: That we were offering space, bringing in my music side, but that's how I connect with people and that's how I get to know people. So bringing in all of my drums and all of the pitched and non pitched percussion instruments and engaging with you all, helping you to know me better and you guys getting to know each other better in the workspace to communicate with each other and. And vibe with each other in a different way.
Nina was talking about yesterday when we met.
She was talking about how when you have a circle filled with instruments that people are not familiar with, it creates an invitation to play.
And so I don't like to say, oh, you do this and you do this. I like for people to just come in and just sit at an instrument and play. Pretend like you're in kindergarten. It helps to bring that natural curiosity that we sometimes lose from our childhood to just play and be creative with each other and not worry about what's right and what's wrong, to bring that creative spark and that energy of collaboration.
I think it's important to have times to. To play and collaborate with each other, to have creative play. So I think that's something really important, especially at a mental health organization, to create that space of creative play and collaborative play.
[00:13:08] Speaker A: So Nina Kelly was just talking about something that. A little bit more specific to kind of her experience here at the Hawk Foundation. But if there's any piece of what she said or just offered that resonates with you, love to hear about it.
[00:13:26] Speaker B: Everything she says resonates with me.
She's so spot on, you know, and. And it's, it's. It's such a beautiful thing because people, when they come in to a drumming experience or a rhythmic experience, they're connecting to their inner rhythm and they're creating this beautiful space where they recognize that their voice matters in the whole.
So with that said, then they can begin to communicate. Maybe some people have a shyness about communicating or expressing themselves, but music is so non intrusive.
The drum is just a beautiful way or any kind of percussive instrument that's kinesthetic, where they can. They can pick up and just begin to express themselves without any rules, without any thought, without any judgment.
And they really become one with that instrument. And that's why. And I'm sure that that doctor you know, Glover has seen this time and time again.
Sometimes when people approach an instrument, they get so locked in to that instrument that they hate to turn it loose.
And you know, it's. It's cute.
[00:14:44] Speaker C: I mean, it's right.
[00:14:45] Speaker B: It's beautiful.
The power of rhythm is magnificent.
And that's why I'm so excited that we're bringing this to rls.
[00:14:55] Speaker C: Yeah.
It evens the playing field.
You know, you don't have to be a trained musician to pick up an instrument and start playing. You can just play a steady beat and then somebody else can come in and play a rhythm and it can suddenly become magical. You don't the. Yeah, so to your point.
Yeah, that's what does it.
[00:15:27] Speaker A: Okay, so we are talking about music, so I thought that it would be apropos to share with our listeners just some samples that the two of you were kind enough to submit, you know, for a little bit of listen and engage.
So let's just start with Kelly.
[00:17:06] Speaker C: Ha.
[00:17:28] Speaker B: Beautiful.
[00:17:32] Speaker A: Okay, so Kelly, maybe say something about what we just heard and what the context for it was.
[00:17:41] Speaker C: Yeah. So I wrote this song for my students when I was teaching in Maryland. The majority of my students were Jewish, and Hashi Venu was a song that we would always sing around the holiday time.
But at the time, I was learning about Bulgarian women's voices, and I thought it would be neat to have an African American woman singing a song about returning to days of old from the Hebrew tradition in a Bulgarian women's choir style.
And it was included on a world music children's album. And so I wrote that because I love combining cultures and reimagining what music can sound like when you combine maybe lyrics from one tradition with the musical sounds of another tradition.
And it was my way of connecting with my students from where they were. That was my way of meeting them where they were, introducing them to a different sound and seeing this black human form in front of them, relating to them, showing that, yeah, we can still.
We have commonalities and I can share and you can share, and we're all learning from each other. So that's why I wrote that. And that song ended up getting legs and it was played on the radio years later in another state. And those people found me and asked if I could give them permission to perform it in their synagogue. And so that song is being performed in synagogues across the country. I had no idea that that would happen. And then it ended up being used in a documentary later on that was in the Cannes Film Festival. So this song, even though I didn't intend it to do all of that because it resonated with people, it ended up having legs that I never would. Would have imagined outside of the classroom.
[00:20:09] Speaker A: Okay, so Nina, let's. Let's.
Or your reaction to my reaction.
[00:20:14] Speaker B: I'm sitting here, My eyes are so tear filled.
Oh, my gosh.
I mean, was that not magnificent? I mean, you. You really transported me with your voice.
I mean, just listening to the tonality and your heart, your soul is so deep into this piece.
Like, I need to play this every morning.
It resets my heart.
[00:20:46] Speaker A: So, Nina, let's.
And hopefully this one will go more smoothly because.
[00:20:54] Speaker B: I am every woman. It's all about creating an experience, celebrating Women's History Month. Creating a. A space where women can come together, feel inspired, uplifted, honored, celebrated, connected to the music that we present.
If you're a music lover, then this is the show that you need to be at. You don't want to miss this show. It's special because we are really taking time to honor women. Not only a community of women, but to celebrate women in music, to bring together some really talented musicians and artists in the San Antonio community and coming together and having a great time sa.
So to put on the I Am Every Woman musical tribute we really rely on.
[00:22:28] Speaker A: All right, so, Nina, I don't doubt that Worlds got rocked.
So maybe, yeah, maybe you could tell us about what it mentioned, Women's History Month. So, yeah, it was tied to that. Wasn't.
[00:22:46] Speaker B: Was, you know, and. And I finally realized.
So we're going into our fifth year, but I finally realized, wow, is there anything happening to honor Women's History Month, you know, in the way of music?
A lot of great events happening, but I just didn't see anything dialed in with regards to music and live music performances. And, you know, I've always.
I've always kind of realized that if there's a need, just feel it.
You know, it's like oftentimes we step back and we say, but how am I going to make it happen? How am I going to do it? And, you know, forget about that. If it's on your heart and you take a step forward, people will come into Your life resources will come your way, conversations will develop. And, you know, before you know it, the vision is, you know, materialized, manifested. And it takes again, it takes people, it takes connections, it takes collaborations, it takes conversations.
And so you heard Carla, she is a magnificent musician.
Stage name Carbon Lilly. I reached out to her two years ago because I carried it by myself and realized this is not.
This is not a solo project.
And so Carla has been so instrumental. Yeah, I am. Every woman was birthed. We fine tune it every year. It grows in numbers, it grows in talent.
I guess at the end of the day, to sum it up, it's about uplifting, it's about generating love, generating joy, generating happiness.
But at the end of the day, it's love, right?
Because without love, you know, we've got nothing. So music is love. And it releases the most amazing tool. You know, you stand and you sing and you perform, but that vibration leaves our mouth, it leaves our hands, it leaves our feet, it leaves the instruments, and it just zoom, goes out there and filters throughout the audience and it does what it's meant to do.
[00:25:00] Speaker A: Okay, so the guiding question for these next couple of questions, I think is why music at.
That's the Robert Lee Sutherland Seminar taking place in San Antonio September 8th and 9th of 2025.
Just to reiterate this year's event theme, Growing Together, Building Capacity for Collective Wellness.
And so, Nina, you're going to be our keynote speaker.
And I would just love. I'm sure you're still formulating what exactly that's going to consist of for you, but just maybe if you could say some things about your goals for the keynote and what you are hoping that people might take from it.
[00:26:02] Speaker B: It's always the goal for everyone in the room to experience what it really feels like to make a connection. I mean, to really build trust and to go beyond our titles, our roles, but to trust the rhythm and, you know, to use the instrument as their tool of engagement, to use it as a common language for all of us in the room. Because, you know, there's no right or no wrong beat. It's just sharing our energy, walking away, knowing that my voice mattered. I contributed. Look how we sounded when we all worked together and were aligned to one mission.
[00:26:40] Speaker A: Kelly, I don't know how much time you've had to think about rls, but I just want your own sense of why having someone like Nina as our keynote speaker, which is somewhat unusual.
I mean, I know over the few RLSes that I've taken part in, we've made efforts to add something a little bit more experiential to what would otherwise be a fairly traditional one to two day conference.
But what about Nino?
And would be a treat for a 2025 Hogg foundation oriented audience in your mind.
[00:27:32] Speaker C: From what I've already learned about Nina through googling her and interacting with her and hearing her talk, she is speaking to the heart of what music brings to well being.
Everything that you talked about, the vibration, the connection music, it activates the vagus nerve that runs, it's a cranial nerve that runs through your throat and singing helps to activate, that goes through your, through your thoracic region down into your stomach and it activates your nervous system, your central nervous system, your parasympathetic and your sympathetic drumming is another way to activate your central nervous system and to get it into a calmer state. And so that's what music brings, that's what she'll be bringing to rls instead of just talking about it in our minds and having this intellectual conversation. If you really want to get into the meat of connection and healing and well being, vibrating with each other using your whole body and those, the, the whole drumming experience, connecting through vibration, that is at the core of healing and well being, vibrating together and reaching heart mind coherence together through music, that's what she's going to bring to this.
It's going to go from an intellectual to the whole body into an embodied somatic experience of what well being is. She's going to embody that for us.
[00:29:25] Speaker A: Okay, so wanting to get you all out of here on this last thing. If you have anything coming up over the coming weeks and months that you would like to just promote or to let people know about, even if it's of main relevance to your respective communities of Austin and San Antonio, perhaps beyond.
This is kind of your opportunity to tell our listeners. So Kelly, if you want to take first cracks, sure.
[00:30:01] Speaker C: Well, I'm going to do my first study as a postdoctoral fellow on the effects of drumming on heart mind coherence.
And so I'm going to be putting out a flyer after I've passed IRB Institutional Review Board.
I'm going to be looking for people in the schools of social work.
I may expand it to education.
And this is like a pilot study, so it's not going to be a huge study, but I'm going to be looking for people who would like to participate in a study that studies the effects of drumming and connection vibration and what it does for your heart and your mind to help you to reach a state of the balance between the parasympathetic and the sympathetic nervous system. After learning about uncomfortable history, uncomfortable music history, to what extent do people enter, fight, flight, or freeze when they're learning about the histories of Celtic instruments, Afro, Latino instruments, indigenous American instruments, Asian instruments, basically ethnomusicology, when they're learning about ways that music has healed and music has dismembered people as well, how does learning about that, how does it affect the central nervous system? And when we come together and bring all those instruments together, how, to what extent does it calm on our central nervous system when we engage in music making together through drumming?
So the flyers will be coming out sometime in early 2026 for this study.
[00:32:07] Speaker A: Okay, great.
Nina, what have you got cooking?
[00:32:14] Speaker B: What have I got cooking? Wow. Well, okay, so I also own a company.
I have a business partner. We run a company called Barista Cats, Cats with a K.
And so we run mobile barista coffee specialty bars, and we serve the United States. So I'm traveling from coast to coast running events, working with our corporate space.
And I mean, it's a slam dunk. It is a blast.
Love the work.
We source coffee beans from Ethiopia and other global regions. And anyway, that's just booming right now. And also we also have a nonprofit called Operation Lola. And we rescue farm animals, specifically potbelly pigs, that are in crises, misunderstood, abused, abandoned.
We. We fund the rescue. Oftentimes we rescue them ourselves. We pick them up, we find, you know, wellness and health care for them, and then we get them into safe sanctuaries and homes where they can live their forever lives. And it is the most rewarding thing.
We started this in 2020.
And then lastly, I tour with Drum Cafe. So I do a lot of travel, a lot of corporate drumming. Facilitation.
I am opening up the SA Jazz Alive with my group on September 27th at Civic park downtown San Antonio. It's going to be fabulous.
Pedrito Martinez is the headliner that night. And we go up on stage right before Pedrito. It's going to be a great night.
I also perform a lot of music projects for musical bridges around the world, and I write programs for them. And we, you know, present the music of our sister cities, most importantly Mexico, Spain, parts of Asia. And so I write programs, we go into schools and present these interactive sessions where kids really have a better understanding of the music and the culture, you know, from other countries that we, you know, celebrate.
[00:34:47] Speaker A: Nina and Kelly, we really do appreciate the both of you taking the time to just to share with us today.
I think this was a fantastic conversation and I look forward to seeing you both at RLS in a couple of months. Thank you so much.
[00:35:03] Speaker B: Thank you.
[00:35:04] Speaker C: Thank you.
[00:35:06] Speaker B: Foreign.
[00:35:16] Speaker A: The Robert Lee Sutherland Seminar is taking place on September 8th and 9th, 2025 at the Norris Conference center in San Antonio, Texas. The theme for this year's seminar is Growing Together Building Capacity for Collecting Wellness.
We have four learning, Building Partnerships and Collaboration, Community Outreach, Engagement and well Being, Data and Evaluation and grant writing and fund development.
The Robert Lee Sutherland seminar began in 1978.
Named in honor of the foundation's first executive director, Dr. Robert Lee Sutherland, it is a biennial event that carries forward his legacy.
National experts and on the ground, community change makers come together to discuss the most important questions related to mental health at the community level.
What does it take to make real change in communities?
What gets in the way of our ability to thrive? How can we create community led solutions?
How can organizations and communities use data effectively?
Although RLS is a biennial event by design, the event has been on hiatus since 2019 because of the pandemic and other disruptions.
But RLS 2019 was a milestone event just the same.
Serving as a coming out for our well Being in Rural Communities initiative, which has gone on to become a cornerstone initiative for the Hogg Foundation.
We produced a short recap video for RLS 2019 that gives you a sense of what's in store for this year.
Here's a listen for this conference though. We're wanting to drill down when it really comes to the issues of that are affecting overall well being and health equity and even the social determinants of mental health as it relates to really rural Texas. Well, some of the biggest challenges that are affecting rural Texas and even rural America are very similar to what happens in our urban and metro areas as well. But they're exacerbated though in rural America because of the challenges of some of the social determinants are more challenging in rural Texas.
[00:38:06] Speaker B: As a foundational principal, I try to live my life by three tenets.
[00:38:09] Speaker A: Number one see the need.
[00:38:10] Speaker B: Number two have compassion.
[00:38:12] Speaker A: Number three do something about it.
[00:38:14] Speaker B: How many people feel confident right now that they can step out there and do this work? Stand up if you feel confident you're.
[00:38:21] Speaker A: Going to have roadblocks.
You want to build on the strengths. We didn't start with our weakness, we started with our strengths.
The opportunity to hear what other people are doing and the approaches that they have to dealing with the challenges. It's always interesting to hear different approaches, different ideas and you know, maybe something you can use or sparks a new idea that you can take back home and use in your county.
[00:38:55] Speaker C: I really enjoyed hearing about Impact Lufkin and the things that they're doing in Lufkin.
And one thing that we are definitely.
[00:39:03] Speaker B: Taking back to Victoria is engaging the youth and we really enjoyed seeing the.
[00:39:08] Speaker C: Pictures that were drawn by the kids in Lufkin and that's a really awesome.
[00:39:13] Speaker B: Way to get their input and hearing what they have to say and including.
[00:39:17] Speaker C: Them in the process. That's something that we're always working towards with our collaborative is finding new ways.
[00:39:22] Speaker B: To include the excluded.
[00:39:34] Speaker A: Once again. To get more info on rls, visit our website at hogg utexas. Edu.
As of this recording, registration is at capacity, but we highly encourage you to join the wait list if you'd like to attend.
The opportunity is still there.
This is not the first time that we have talked about music on the podcast. Back in 2018, we did an episode titled Mental Health and the Musician's Life, a look at the mental health challenges faced by working musicians against the backdrop of the highly competitive live music scene in Austin, Texas.
Our two guests were Patsy Baresa, the then clinical director of the Sims foundation, and Vanessa Lively, an Austin musician. Here's a look back and I personally.
[00:40:32] Speaker D: Have not only experienced it in my own life being here where there were definitely times where I thought I'm going to have to leave this city because I can't afford to to own a home here or live here, and I became a mother and thought, well, you know, my husband and I were both pretty active musicians, just the two of us touring a lot and we had to make some drastic changes to even how we operated and rewrite everything just to try to stay in Austin. So, and we've seen all our friends have the exact same struggle. And I, you know, I have these dreams of oh, wouldn't it be nice if we could form these, these even these music communities where we have almost like a music co op or music apartment complex or a music tiny home area where it's affordable living for musicians. And then there's also that awesome community that would form of support systems and peers and magic that would happen too.
[00:41:27] Speaker A: The voice you just heard was Vanessa Lively. Not only is she an accomplished musician, but she also manages the nonprofit Home Street Music, which brings music and community to the unhoused in Austin. I've included a link to the full episode in the show notes, so check it out.
And that does it for this episode. We're Glad you could join us. Production assistance by Carissa Sazor, Kate Rooney, and Daryl Wiggins and thanks as always to the Hogg foundation for its support.
If you have comments or anything that you would like to share, share about the podcast, feel free to reach out to us at into the foldustin utexas.edu.
especially thoughtful comments will be acknowledged during a future episode.
You're My Our Mental Health Matters.
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Transition Music by Stephen Siebert Taking us out now is Anna's Good Vibes by our old friend Anna Harris. Thanks for joining us.
